The Southern Gothic is its own subgenre of Gothic media, characterized by bleak settings in the Deep South, flawed (and often disturbing) characters, and the darker side of the Southeastern United States including racism, sexism, and Barefoot Poverty. If you're in Louisiana, Hollywood Voodoo might make an appearance.

Unlike The Savage South where the southern areas are teeming with life (most of which wants you dead), Southern Gothic settings have a constant feel of decay, death and malaise. Anything living there will feel unnatural on top of possibly being very dangerous. Supernatural elements are popular, especially with themes of the undead or "things that should not be" instead of the typical wild animals and hostile natives usually seen in The Savage South.

Examples:

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Anime And Manga

Me and the Devil Blues is loosely based on the life of legendary blues player Robert Johnson. Set in the Deep South during the Great Depression, it follows a man named RJ who barters away his soul at a crossroads for the ability to play perfectly.

Comic Books

Von Herling, Vampire Hunter is set in a small town in the remote wooded mountains of East Tennessee, where the titular protagonist has to locate and destroy a vampire.

The Skeleton Key has this feel, with the primary setting being an old, run-down plantation house in Louisiana, owned by an old, run-down couple. There's also a bit of Hoodoo mysticism thrown in for an extra creepy factor which later becomes a major plot point.

1972 horror film The Other, along with the book it was based on. Set New England during 1935, and starring Creepy Twins, Niles and Holland Perry, it features old, decaying buildings, sun-parched yet oddly idyllic scenery, and horrible secrets.

Carson McCullers' stories are soaked in this. She once accused Harper Lee of "poaching on her preserve".

Anne Rice's Blackwood Farm has more mausoleums than people, not to mention an entire house sunk to the second story in a swamp.

Pretty much everything Anne Rice does is Southern Gothic—with an emphasis on the Gothic part.

George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream is very much this. Nineteenth century, steamers in the South, vampires with slaves and a creepy mansion.

A Rose for Emily, by Main/William Faulkner, could well be the poster child of this trope. Emily Grierson's mansion, a symbol of better days long since past, is described in the most wretched terms of rot and decay—and the house hides terrible secrets.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu abandons the traditional New England as a setting for monstrous buried secrets, wandering Southwards to the dank swamps of Louisiana, where Cthulhu's cultists gather for celebration with orgies and human sacrifices.

Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds mixes this with Magic Realism is a story of a girl who sees ghosts dealing with the legacy of her great-great grandfather, an evil sorcerer. In fact most of Priests work fits here.

The Caster Chronicles is not as horror-y as the classic model, but features a lot of the same atmosphere and elements, showing the Deep South as being full of things that aren't what they seem, that can't be explained, and that are often very dangerous.

Eden Green is a modern take on the genre, mixing smartphone GPS and mysterious needle monsters. It also takes place in Gothic, an expy of the author's home city of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

The Walking Dead dove headfirst into this territory the moment the survivors left the Atlanta Metro Area.

The Originals is set in storied and beautiful New Orleans. It weaves her extremely eventful history into the narrative, and makes use of the sometimes macabre beauty of the city's streets, cemeteries, and churches for visual interest. The story also ventures out into the surrounding rural areas of Louisiana—whose swamps and woods are both very different from the city, yet still have a similarly spooky beauty.

Outcast, about Kyle Barnes, who lives in a small West Virginia town plagued by demonic possessions fits this trope. It helps that the comic it's based on was created by Robert Kirkman, who also created The Walking Dead.

A lot of the imagery in Beyoncé's visual special for her album Lemonade falls into this, much of it being shot in Louisiana.

Professional Wrestling

The Wyatt Family - a Charles Manson-meets-True Detective stable of evil southern cultits - play upon this in a way that's so legitimately chilling that it's probably inappropriate for what is, ostensibly, family entertainment.

Tabletop Games

Rage Across Appalachia, a supplemental book for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, runs on this trope. Memorable examples of horror from the book include the Bledsons, a rural family of bane-possessed men, and the Pigeon River Howlers, a bluegrass band made up of Black Spiral Dancers who corrupt their audiences through music and dancing.

Voodoo Whisperer: Curse of a Legend The town is under a voodoo curse and the player character must free the inhabitants. The ghosts of murder victims can be conjured up for a chat to gather clues and the grounds of her home include a family mausoleum and a swamp with an aligator in it.

Scooby and Shaggy both have ancestral (probably on mother sides) southern gothic homes. As depicted in "Scooby's Roots" and "Boo Brothers".

Played with on King of the Hill when we get to meet Bill Dauterive's family. He's from Louisiana and his family home is a typical crumbling plantation with weird family members and a secret. In this case barbecue sauce, but still.

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